August 29, 2012

The Coup was a 1978 bestseller by John Updike about Africa that is almost totally forgotten today, even though it was written by America's most gifted novelist at his mid-40s peak, when he was, in his own words, feeling "full of beans." Thus, it's an absurdly high-spirited first person account of a Muslim Marxist dictator of a drought-stricken African country.

The extraordinary lucidity of Scoop's prose has helped it endure because it is the rare novel that is both brilliant and an easy read. In contrast, Updike was feeling his oats in The Coup, and the style is over the top: William F. Buckley published a column in 1978 saying that while people accuse him of using sesquipedalian words too much, here's a list of all the words in The Coup that he doesn't know the meaning of. I recall feeling proud that, being a good Boy Scout, I knew a word that WFB didn't: scree.

I occasionally run into stuff that deeply impresses me. For instance, Updike’s The Coup, which I reviewed for New York magazine. It astonishes me that it is so little recognized. It’s the brilliant put-down of Marxist Third World nativism. It truly is. And hilarious. It’s a successor to Black Mischief, but done in that distinctively Gothic style of Updike’s—very different from the opéra bouffe with which Evelyn Waugh went at that subject fifty years ago.

Updike's basic message in his 1978 novel was: America is going to win the Cold War. Capitalism makes people happier than Communism does, so these Third World Marxist dictators you read about in the newspapers all the time are going to lose.

This conclusion was not at all obvious in the Carter Era. When I read it in the tumultuous summer of 1980, I was surprised by Updike's optimism.

The Coup, however, has vanished from all memory. Almost nobody, for instance, noticed how similar the President's parents were to The Coup's ambitious African student narrator and his white American coed second wife. Joyce Carol Oates wrote in the New Republic in 1979:

Ellelloû is, or was, a devout Muslim, and a jargon-ridden Marxist whose hatred for all things American—"America, that fountainhead of obscenity and glut"—is explained partly by the fact that he attended a small college in Franchise, Wisconsin where he received an unfair grade of B- in African history, from a trendy professor who was jealous of his relationship with a white girl named Candy, and partly by the fact that he married this girl and brought her back to his kingdom, where their marriage quickly deteriorated. (Candy, called "Pinktoes" by the blacks she compulsively pursues, is coarse-mouthed, nagging, stereotyped as any cartoon suburban wife; even her most ostensibly idealistic actions—like marrying a ragamuffin Negro who seemed so lonely at college—are motivated by cliched notions of "liberalism." And of course she marries Ellelloû to enrage her bigoted father.)

Candy is probably closer to Ruth, Obama Sr.'s third wife, who married him in Boston and moved with him to Kenya, where she got to know him well enough to hate him. Oates continues:

in sharp contrast to [the narrator's] indefatigable syntactical acrobatics the other voices of the novel are either flat and silly or a parody of US advertising rhythm and jargon. ... Candy greets his infrequent visits with "Holy Christ, look who it isn't," refuses to listen to his formal Islamic pronouncements which are, to her, "Kismet crap," and says of his strategic execution of the old king: "Well, chief, how's top-level tricks? Chopping old Edumu's noggin off didn't seem to raise the humidity any."

Oates compared it to Nabokov's comic novel about a deposed ruler, Pale Fire, and it's in that class.

I presume that Obama has at least started to read it. I'd be interested to know his reaction to it. In Dreams from My Father, he describes his acute distress reading on the airplane on the way to Kenya, The Africans by David Lamb, a straightforward account by the L.A. Times' Nairobi correspondent of post-colonial African dysfunction. Updike's The Coup would have hit even closer to home.

For Obama I'd recommend a novel of mine called The Coup. It's about an imaginary African country where the dictator pretends to hate the US, though he actually went to college here. The politics were based on Gaddafi - what's he called, not Mohamed, Muammar, right? The joke is how unlike Obama my character is!

Of course, as far as I can tell from Google, Updike, me, and about one other person in the history of the Internet have ever publicly noticed the connection between The Coup and Obama's parents. It would be interesting to ask Obama about it, but nobody ever has. Because that would be interesting.

Updike's basic message in his 1978 novel was: America is going to win the Cold War. Capitalism makes people happier than Communism does, so these Third World Marxist dictators you read about in the newspapers all the time are going to lose.

Didn't Updike's daughter marry an Obama Sr. type? He may have ended up reassessing this message....

I just so happen to be reading Rabbit at Rest right now. I'll have to give The Coup a gander.

My sense of Updike is that he wasn't really that conservative, something along the lines of a religious Northeastern Kennedy liberal, but that he tended to emphasize his conservatism in his stories a bit to differentiate from Philip Roth and the sexual revolution.

The Coup is a great read if you like Updike's sometimes-frantic style (which I do). It's also likely he'd never have gotten it published in today's PC climate; it's way politically incorrect.

I recently reread Scoop, and as much as I admire Updike, there's not much question Waugh was better. Scoop is a comic masterpiece. Waugh's characters are so, so good: even the bit players such as Katchen, Boot's erstwhile love interest, resonate sharply with contemporary types.

But did Updike paint the truer picture of 3rd world tinpot dictatorships? Up to a point, Lord Copper!

I read The Coup about 30 years ago, and yes, it's an entertaining and insightful book by a good writer. It's "forgotten" because its content is so unfashionable among the literati. If you haven't read it, then read it -- it's a definitive analysis of pseudo-intellectual anti-colonialism and therefore, as Steve notes, useful for understanding the mentality that shaped Barack Obama.

If you have read it, than may I recommend a complementary piece to it, a novel about what those same literati would probably call the "clash of civilizations" in equatorial Africa, A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul. It's a shorter book than The Coup, published one year later in 1979, and it's a thoroughly engrossing read, packed with insight and information. It's also not much discussed today, probably because its content is just too damn accurate.

Yes, Steve, agreed it's a slow start if you're accustomed to reading contemporary fiction, but I found the opening sequences extremely funny. Don't you think Waugh was having a bit of a go at P G Wodehouse? I love Wodehouse, and I thought Waugh was aping/sending him up beautifully.

If you are 21, one thing that would be useful is to discover how much better old Brits were at prose. It can be challenge to get used to various classic British rhetorical styles, but it's worth doing. Here are some high Return on Investment selections that are rewarding without being too hard or too long.

Waugh's Scoop is high on the short list of books that are both sensational in classic prose style and a quick read. The opening is a little scattershot, but keep reading at least until the second time "cleft stick" comes up.

Read the autobiography Churchill wrote for boys in 1930. It's called A Roving Commission in Britain and something generic like My Life over here. It's a great boys' adventure story, in part because Churchill makes no attempt to impart mature wisdom to his tale. When he's describing what his life was like when he was four, he exhibits only the values of a four-year-old boy.

Read a few chapters of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Read at least until you laugh at his jokes.

I extracted a bravura chunk of Macaulay's History of England a month ago.

Read the opening of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations about the pin factory. This is a slow read, but the pin factory example is great.

Read a Kipling short story, such as The Man Who Would Be King. If you like the short stories, try Kim, which is dazzling high literature. For poetry, If would rank near the top of poems worth reading at 21.

Open the the second half of Boswell's Life of Johnson at random and read until some transcribed conversation seems funny.

Wodehouse's Jeeves and Bertie comic novels peak around 1940, such as Jeeves in the Morning.

Swift's Gulliver's Travels is about the earliest readable British prose: the least known of the travels, the third, to the island of Newtonian scientists, is the funniest.

Among more recent books ... Not quite in the same league in terms of prose style, but John Keegan's The Face of Battle. A great book about the British in World War II is Richard Adams' novel about talking rabbits, Watership Down.

Paul Johnson can be a spectacular historian. Modern Times from 1983 is the greatest neoconservative book. His earlier book from 1972 when he was still on the Left, A History of the English / The Offshore Islanders is an awesome work of Orwell-style socialist nationalism.

Plays are usually a tough read. You'll notice that nobody reads screenplays for fun. Playwrights write plays to work on the stage, not on the page. Julius Caesar is the most readable of Shakespeare's plays.

Shakespearean criticism is an important genre on its own. Read the critic William Hazlitt on a Shakespeare play you are familiar with. He's probably the best prose introduction to the early 19th Century Romantic period.

Among Tom Stoppard's plays, Arcadia is likely his masterpiece, but Travesties is a good initial goal. It's a play about how Lenin and Joyce were in Zurich in 1917. It is, in part, a parody of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, with the main character, who is very much the hero, being a very British upper class twit in the mode of Ernest, or not Ernest, the other one (Algernon). He tells Lenin off good.

I read Wilde's Earnest at 20 and didn't get it at all. However, Camille Paglia's chapter on Earnest in Sexual Personae is hilarious because she understands how extremely gay the play is. (The 1952 movie of Earnest with Joan Greenwood is pretty funny, better than the Reese Witherspoon version of a decade ago.) If you get into Wodehouse's Bertie and Jeeves books, however, you can read Travesties without reading Earnest. Think of Travesties main character as Bertie Wooster and it works fine.

Poetry is another tough read for 21st Century people. For T,S. Eliot, I'd start with Prufrock, for Romantics, I'd start with Coleridges Kublai Khan, Shelley's Ozymandias and Wordsworth's more political sonnets, such as Milton, London 1803, and For Toussaint L'Ouverture. The section in Milton's Paradise Lost about Lucifer being cast down into Hell is spectacularly in touch with today's comic book movie tastes, but, famously (as Dr. Johnson said), nobody every wished the entire poem longer.

Steve, thanks much for that list -- I'm (the anon from 11:26 and 12:01) in remarkable agreement with your choices. I also agree with your suggestion to read excerpts in many cases; one of the main problems of discovering classic literature is the barrier posed by sheer length, and the energy needed to surmount it.

The young reader might also try some Jane Austen; she's very accessible (my nine year old daughter recently plowed through Pride and Prejudice, albeit with some skipovers) and certainly witty and elegant.

I would add James Joyce's Dubliners to your list. It's accessible, and it gives you a good taste of JJ's genius.

For Eliot, some may find "Four Quartets" attractive; again, excerpting would be fine. Eliot's style in 4Qs is such that you get the idea pretty quickly if you'll like it or not.

I would also push more Orwell; I'd certainly recommend "Politics and the English Language" as another good starting point.

Finally, to quibble: Jeeves in the Morning may be very fine, but Right Ho, Jeeves is unsurpassable. It is comic perfection, from end to end.

I also think you're right about the English-English/American split. There aren't many rivals from this side of the pond who can match the Brits' sheer 'dazzle', as you put it. Maybe John Kennedy Toole in Confederacy of Dunces, and Faulkner sometimes, but the list is short. Even Fitzgerald falls a bit short of the best of the Brits, I'd have to say.

If you are a 21 year old guy, you need to read Jane Austen. You won't get all of it, but it will help you understand the opposite sex. (The Bridget Jones books, which are a modern riff on Pride and Prejudice, won't hurt either.)

Here's a question: I'm pretty good at picking out prize excerpts, so I got to thinking about what I could legally get away with in terms of setting up a website with the best excerpts from out of copyright books. How far back do I have to go? Ron Unz says 1923 is the cutoff date in America. Is it the same in Britain?

The scene in The Coup where Ellellou endlessly ponders his white girlfriend in a dorm-room is a comic contrast to Obama and "Julia." The difference is that Ell is a leader of men and conqueror of women (though he finds himself conquered), whereas Obama is such only in his mind. Maybe Ellellou is the super-hero Obama turns into.

The best scene might be when the white devil brings water and such to Ellellou's country, and Ellellou is convinced that the mob is going to go all anti-colonial and race-riot, when instead they just want the hoses turned on.

Sorry for being an ignoramus but I don´t even know these people.. I´m 21 and have been raised by cultural marxists...

Steve, I respect your judgement like few others,,(i´ll include buchanan with ya) you think you could make a must read list for us dummies?? if you could we´d be better off ... thanks

"

Evelyn (Evelyn used to be a male name) is a major, 20th c. author. You should make his acquaintance. Since you were raised by NPR types, perhaps you already know him a bit through Brideshead Revisited repeats on PBS?Personally, I most remember him for The Loved One, about a pet cemetery in California, 1940s. Cartoonish but prescient nonetheless, in describing over-the-top commercialism of sentimentality (even though I think pet cemeteries are good ideas, just don't make them religious.)

True, but Austen doesn't just help you understand women; it helps you understand human nature, as it manifests in civilized society. W. H. Auden wrote of her:

"...But tell Jane Austen, that is, if you dareHow much her novels are beloved down here.She wrote them for posterity, she said:‘Twas rash, but by posterity she’s read.You could not shock her more than she shocks me;Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.It makes me most uncomfortable to seeAn English spinster of the middle classDescribe the amourous effects of ‘brass’,Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety..."

"A great book about the British in World War II is Richard Adams' novel about talking rabbits, Watership Down."

This is probably my favorite book: I've read it so many times that when I pick it up I flip to a random page and can instantly tell where in the story I am.

As for poetry- listening to recordings tends to be much more pleasant than reading text, in my experience. The parts of Kubla Khan I remember best (and enjoy the most) are the ones that I had a brief recording of.

Lots of great recommends here. I would also say, for a younger reader into science fiction, to try some of the Brit SF writers of the '50s and '60s.

John Wyndham, with "Day of the Triffids" and "Midwich Cuckoos"; JG Ballard with "The Drowned World" and "The Crystal World"; Brian Aldiss with "Hothouse" and "Greybeard." John Christopher with "No Blade of Grass."

Unlike the rather optimistic american SF of the period, these books are all rather pessimistic about the long-term fate of mankind, with a common theme that civilization is fragile and can end suddenly, on any pretext ("Blade of Grass" is about what happens when there's a global grain blight.)

These books are all relatively short and written in sharp, precise prose and are darkly witty at times. Burgess' "Clockwork Orange" falls into this line, though obviously it's a tougher read.

I'm glad to see you suggested Watership Down. Upon recently re-reading it I found the section where the rabbits encounter the deracinated, pretentious, fatalist, meterosexual, artsy-fartsy rabbits the most eye-opening. More relevant today than the commie rabbits of general Woundwart they encounter at the end.

There is also a resemblance between Obama and the hero of Updike's novel Terrorist. The mother is white (Irish-American) and the father, who absconded at birth, is African (or maybe Egyptian, I forget). Anyway the son idealizes the absent father and resents the mother with whom he lives in the New Jersey suburbs of NYC, where he finds it impossible to fit in. It is a story of alienation -- a very empathetic one I might add -- and a very good novel.

I thought the funniest passage was when Ellelou went on a rant about tourists:

"He was flooding my purified, penniless but proud country with animalistic buses stuffed full of third-echelon Chou Shmoes, German shutterbugs, British spinters, bargain-seeking Bulgarians, curious Danes, Italian archaeologists, and trip-crazed American collegians bribed by their soused and adulterous parents to get out of the house and let capitalism collapse in peace"

Its funny to think of "The Coup" and "A Bend in the River" side by side. Updike could see the humor in ultimately destructive postcolonial third-world intellectual pretensions, but the famously dyspeptic Naipaul, writing about the same subject, produced a few books that are incredibly depressing and nihilistic.

Here's a question: I'm pretty good at picking out prize excerpts, so I got to thinking about what I could legally get away with in terms of setting up a website with the best excerpts from out of copyright books. How far back do I have to go? Ron Unz says 1923 is the cutoff date in America. Is it the same in Britain?

IANAL, but it looks like work by any British writer who died before 1925 is in the public domain. Otherwise, copyright expires 70 years after the end of the calendar year of the author's death. So Orwell's work will be public domain in 2021; Waugh's, 2037.

Why limit yourself to a website? Ebook and print-on-demand publishing is fairly easy, and you would be adding enough value as an editor to justify a $5-10 ebook and a $15-20 trade paperback (with royalties to you of $3-5 per copy sold). Seriously, if you are at all interested, leave me a comment and I can contact you privately about it.

The Updike sounds interesting. The only thing of Updike's I've read in decades was "The Witches of Eastwick," which I thought was absolute dreck (punctured now and again by a brilliant sentence).

I presume that Obama has at least started to read it.

You presume wrongly, I'm sure. I would bet that Obama hasn't read five novels in the past ten years. He's a life-long slacker and has zero intellectual curiosity (people who feel they know everything never need to actually, you know, know anything).

No it is not. It's per capita income is about $3000 less than Trinidad and only about $1500 more than Brazil...

In the Human Development Index it ranks behind Qatar and Bahrain and slightly above Barbados and Palau:

Chile is a dump but it tends to get good publicity (except for extreme left pro-Allende types) from the mainstream because Pinochet was a CIA backed stooge and because it aggressively imposed neoliberal economics that's been good for rentiers.

"One of the reasons professional athletes illegally use steroids is to help speed up their recovery time after a particularly grueling game or injury, thus making them fresh as spring chickens the next time they compete."

"Ron Unz says 1923 is the cutoff date in America. Is it the same in Britain?"

No, it is not the same in Britain. 1923 is the magic date in the US because of the Sonny Bono Copyright Act.

However, US copyright law applies to ANY book that is copyrighted in the US.

Thus, a British-written book may have lost its British copyright and still have a US copyright.

What you need to do is set up a server in a foreign country with no copyright law or a country in which no one bothered to get a copyright or a country that didn't even exist (Dubai? Tuvalu? Slovakia?) and serve your web pages up from there.

That way, you won't be violating copyright. Alternatively, provide links to a Gutenbergish site in a country in which the copyrights have expired. Like this site for books by Orwell and many others.

You should consider starting a book club. Include Amazon affiliate links so readers can give you a few bucks when they buy the books and then we could discuss them in detail here.

Re your recommendations, Scoop is great. Kim is as well; I read that one on a Nook, which had links to a handy glossary explaining some of the historic references. Re Gulliver, were the Newtonians the Laputans? I haven't read that since I was in high school. Will have to revisit it.

I'm curious if you've read Jonathan Franzen's last two novels (The Corrections and Freedom). If you haven't, I think you might like them and perhaps find some material worth blogging about in them.

Steve, I just wanted to say thanks for recommending The Coup. It's one of those books that changes your frame of reference, and I never would have picked it up if you hadn't mentioned it. I recently watched The Last King of Scotland as well, and the two works are of a piece.

Read England in the age of Wycliffe by Trevelyan. Read the collected poetry of Louis MacNeice, a much neglected figure. Read Auden and Eliot too of course. Read the essays of Bacon and Hume, the critical biographies of English poets by Johnson, the prose of Matthew Arnold, the prose of John Maynard Keynes, read Pickwick Papers (but nothing later) by Dickens, read Orwell's essays, read Carlyle, read the Psalms and Ecclesiastes and Genesis. And of course Shakespeare.

I disagree about the English/American split. Emerson, William James (not Henry), Emily Dickinson, Eliot (or is he English?) are in the same league. Edmund Wilson is probably the greatest literary critic there ever was. Hemingway and Fitzgerald (Great Gatsby especially) hold up well. etc..

I mentioned in another comment thread that I'd put him up against any of your smug Brits in terms of raw verbal horsepower. He's a technical virtuoso and a true genius but his work is often too difficult to engage. I'd liken him to Joyce in some respects. Both were absolute masters of the English language and both have works that are readable and, uhh, less readable.

I think almost anyone can enjoy Joyce's short stories and they are brilliant. Portrait of the Artist is pretty readable and still brilliant. Ulysses is brilliant but less readable. Finnegan's Wake is rough going. Similarly, I think anyone can enjoy DFW's magazine pieces while his novels gets a bit esoteric. Maybe that's the price of genius in the modern age when a writer feels like he has to keep pushing the boundaries of originality.

I wasn't aware of either book but ready your summery of "The Coup" and some reviews of "Black Mischief" it seems the novels are perfect bookends for the folly of intervention in Africa by either communism or capitalism They are better off alone as are we.

There aren't many rivals from this side of the pond who can match the Brits' sheer 'dazzle', as you put it. Maybe John Kennedy Toole in Confederacy of Dunces, and Faulkner sometimes, but the list is short.

I'd put Nathanael West's two short novels Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust on that list. They're both short reads and dazzling.

"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. The quotations, when engraved upon the memory, give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more."

Chile is the best-governed country in Latin America now (thanks in part to policies enacted under Pinochet and still maintained today), but it's not at first world income levels. It would be interesting to see the potential of Brazil or Argentina if they were governed as well as Chile though. One of them might have the potential to be a first world country in that case. Argentina had one of the highest per-capita GDPs in the world in the 1920s.

Anon at 12:35 (I'm the other anon you're replying to; Mr Tall hereafter), that's an excellent call. West is indeed dazzling, and those are two exceptional little novels. The Day of the Locust is more famous, but I actually prefer Miss Lonelyhearts.

The LA setting also brings to mind another trans-atlantic dazzler our young reader should definitely engage: Raymond Chandler. If I only I could put together sentences like his . . . .

And, finally, still in the noir vein, James Cain is remarkable, and very efficient reading. You can read Double Indemnity, for example, in a sitting, but you'll never forget it.

For those with either Nook or Kindle, Project Gutenberg here will serve you well for Kipling and Smith and many others.

Let me add some others:

Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, Professor Challenger, and White Company stories. All public domain by now. Excellent and page-turning.

Eric Ambler, particularly his earlier and later books. Coffin for Dimitrios is a classic, but Doctor Frigo (covering some of the same ground South American style as Coup only with ironic twist thriller) is great, as well as the Levanter, Care of Time, and State of Siege (called "the Night-Comers" in the UK). Doctor Frigo is in my opinion brilliant, and the Levanter is amazing.

i will back Luke Lea's recommendation of "To the Lighthouse" and Woolf in general. Woolf gets a really bad rap from some quarters, but if you remove "A Room of One's Own" (which is not radical feminism by any means, but simply a rich, ambitious, talented woman's pissed-off rant about being denied the resources to the fops who attended Oxford in the '20s---Woolf is the sort of woman, like George Eliot, who the rules should've bent for) and the more wilder, avant-garde books, there are a few really top-rate novels.

in particular "Orlando" and "Between the Acts" (both of which you can get through that Adelaide site linked to earlier). Woolf had a real, piercing love for English literature---she saw herself as a poor inheritor at best--and these books are valentines to her heritage. The Elizabethan chapter of "Orlando" is just stunning, absolutely wonderful writing.

To anon at 6:16: if you're looking for superb essayists, I'd recommend C S Lewis. Most of his work is explicitly Christian/apologetic, of course, but there are few, if any, examples in English of a style so limpid and effortlessly readable.

Twain, specifically "Roughing It", is a great read in your late teens/early 20's. Austen is worthwhile in your early 20's to get they lay of the land, and again in your late 20's when you have a more sophisticated understanding of men and women.

I recently read The Singapore Grip, by J.G. Farrell. A great historical novel that well describes the weakness and dysfunction of a multicultural society (in this case, Singapore on the eve of the WW2 Japanese invasion). He also wrote hist. novels on British India and Ireland's troubles. Died in his 40s, I think, from a rogue wave that caught him while he was fishing from his oceanfront property in Ireland.

The protagonist of Grip reminded me somewhat of the one in Confederation of Dunces, so there's some humor in it also.

High-brow literature was never really America's thing, and the quality seems to have gone down even more over the twentieth century, but there are a few recent writers other than Updike worth reading. Saul Bellow was an excellent writer, even if he never he could never really figure out how to develop and structure a good plot. Many of the readers of this blog would enjoy his "Mr. Sammler's Planet", which is, in some ways, the best expression of Jewish neo-conservatism.

After reading The Coup, I'm not so sure Waugh was better. Scoop is unquestioningly great, but The Coup is better than Black Mischief.

Speaking of which, one of the blurbs on the back if my paperback of Black Mischief calls it a novel of "declining Britain and emerging Africa". Another suggests Waugh's satire implies a genuine fondness for Africans. I don't see it. At the end of Black Mischief, the country is a League of Nations protectorate. Updike's novel was more generous, and, from the perspective of today, perhaps more accurate, as natural resource wealth has helped a number of African countries advance from perennial destitution.

Tracking John Updike's Foot Fetish.This is only scratching the surface! Some quotes from six of Updike's fifty odd books.He kneels to comply. Annoyed at such ready compliance, which implies pleasure, she stiffens her feet and kicks so her toenails stab his cheek, dangerously near his eyes.

Tracking John Updike's Foot Fetish.This is only scratching the surface! Some quotes from six of Updike's fifty odd books.He kneels to comply. Annoyed at such ready compliance, which implies pleasure, she stiffens her feet and kicks so her toenails stab his cheek, dangerously near his eyes.http://postmoderndeconstructionmadhouse.blogspot.com/2013/10/tracking-john-updikes-foot-fetish-part-1.html#.Up9tyzYo6M8

Perhaps I should say Angstrom’s awareness of the signs, or, to be a bit more accurate, Updike’s descriptions of Angstrom’s awareness of the signs, rather than the signs themselves.http://postmoderndeconstructionmadhouse.blogspot.com/2013/12/signs-and-signage-in-updikes-rabbit.html#.UyN2cj9dXxA

Here's the Google Wallet FAQ. From it: "You will need to have (or sign up for) Google Wallet to send or receive money. If you have ever purchased anything on Google Play, then you most likely already have a Google Wallet. If you do not yet have a Google Wallet, don’t worry, the process is simple: go to wallet.google.com and follow the steps." You probably already have a Google ID and password, which Google Wallet uses, so signing up Wallet is pretty painless.

You can put money into your Google Wallet Balance from your bank account and send it with no service fee.

Google Wallet works from both a website and a smartphone app (Android and iPhone -- the Google Wallet app is currently available only in the U.S., but the Google Wallet website can be used in 160 countries).

Or, once you sign up with Google Wallet, you can simply send money via credit card, bank transfer, or Wallet Balance as an attachment from Google's free Gmail email service. Here'show to do it.

(Non-tax deductible.)

Fourth: if you have a Wells Fargo bank account, you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Wells Fargo SurePay. Just tell WF SurePay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). (Non-tax deductible.)

Fifth: if you have a Chase bank account (or, theoretically,other bank accounts), you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Chase QuickPay (FAQ). Just tell Chase QuickPay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address (steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). If Chase asks for the name on my account, it's Steven Sailer with an n at the end of Steven. (Non-tax deductible.)

My Book:

"Steve Sailer gives us the real Barack Obama, who turns out to be very, very different - and much more interesting - than the bland healer/uniter image stitched together out of whole cloth this past six years by Obama's packager, David Axelrod. Making heavy use of Obama's own writings, which he admires for their literary artistry, Sailer gives the deepest insights I have yet seen into Obama's lifelong obsession with 'race and inheritance,' and rounds off his brilliant character portrait with speculations on how Obama's personality might play out in the Presidency." - John Derbyshire Author, "Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics" Click on the image above to buy my book, a reader's guide to the new President's autobiography.